@Ceili,
Ceili wrote:
I hadn't realized we were in a pissing match.
I didn't call Canucks smug, you did. I was merely lumping the N. American continent into a convenient group to say that some of the earlier post reminded me of the attitude that must have been prevalent during the war. Not sure why this is ludicrous. Sorry you can't make the leap.
As for the the numbers... I admit I hadn't looked them up, but for the last eight or so years, we have had news reports of entire families, children, villages being blown to smithereens by the allies. I have yet to hear of similar events happening on N. American soil.
Here is a site that has tabulated all the deaths and causalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has some pretty horrifying numbers of both soldiers and civilians.
Read and weep.
http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html
- About 296 times as many people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq than in the ghastly attacks of September 11, 2001.
- More than 127 times as many people have been killed in these wars and occupations than in all terrorist attacks in the world from 1993-2004, according to data compiled by the US State Department.
I referred to my "smug Canadian friends."
I meant it literally. I have a number of Canadian friends, some of whom are smug.
Unless there is evidence that the government or the American people are clamoring for the internment of all Muslims on US soil, there is no serious reason for anyone to draw a comparison between the current American atmosphere and that which existed after Pearl Harbor. However, who is to question what might trigger a rememberance in anyone individual's mind.
Your comment was
"Far more people have been killed at the hand of the Allies than by the hand of the Taliban."
In support of this statement you provide a link to a site that lists casualty statistics for the US wars in Iraq and Afghan.
Are you assuming that all of the civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were the responsibility of the Allies?
Since I don't believe anyone suggests the Taliban was responsible for 9/11, I'm not sure why you would draw a comparison to the casualty numbers from that event.
I haven't looked, but I suspect that there must be some source that will at least estimate the number of people killed by the Taliban since they first came on the scene in Afghanistan.
It seems to me that you have drawn a quite simplistic conclusion. Wars that, at least arguably, were motivated by terrorist attacks have killed more people than these percipitating attacks themselves, and therefore it might be appropriate to view these wars with ambiguity if not skepticism.
I'm not sure if the logical extension of this conclusion is that nations should just suck it up when terrorists attacks, because to do anything in response, costs more lives overall than were lost to the terrorists.
Is it?
